There’s more to a brand than just a cool design or image. A brand is a symbol of your company’s core values, culture, messaging and target audiences. It’s important to have a deep understanding of what your company is, who your competitors are and how you fit in or stand out in your industry.

A critical element in brand development, is understanding your customers — their wants, needs and beliefs that drive their attitudes and actions. If done well, your brand will convey the company’s benefits that meet those needs.

Once this important information is gathered, it’s time to clearly define your …

In January, Dale Riehart wrote a great list of ways to prepare for working with a professional writer. One of his suggestions is that business clients prepare a positioning statement.

Of course, a positioning statement isn’t just important for a professional writer. It’s a valuable tool to have whenever you want to talk about your product or company. Think of it like an elevator pitch for copy - short and to the point. So how do you prepare a positioning statement?

Dale offers a proven and elegant solution: ad-libs.

Just fill in the blanks appropriately and …

After years of working on my client’s websites and branding I was not following my own advice and presenting myself correctly. I used my own website to showcase my work but also as a playground, and it became very inconsistent over the years. It was time to take charge of my own branding and make changes. This last fall I re-hauled my own branding, and I would like to share with you a few tips in general about branding that I had to relearn myself through this process.

Is your target market comfortable with your brand? Do you have an existing …

‘LIKE’ if you support our troops! ‘LIKE’ if you believe in God! ‘LIKE’ to help the underprivileged!

How many times have you clicked a Facebook ‘LIKE’ on a picture of kittens, or something like that, that popped up on your Facebook page?

And what could be wrong with supporting our troops, liking kittens or helping the poor? Well, before you click ‘LIKE’ on your Facebook page again, here are a couple of things you should know.

First off, Facebook fan pages can be changed or renamed. You can also pass ownership of your page to another. Unfortunately that opens up a …

Video communication is where it’s at these days. It’s become a way to tell stories and engage target audiences in a compelling and innovative way. And, it’s a way to create memorable messages that can help sell a product, influence a behavior and serve as an information resource.

Marketing professionals began embracing video as a communication tool over the past several years. Although the market is seemingly flooded with millions of videos, there is still room to position within this medium. And, it is a surprisingly cost-effective method to successfully integrate stories, brand positions, education and engagement into websites and interactive …

We’ve all seen those ads for investment banks - a smiling couple holding hands as they walk on the beach, the waves gently lapping at their feet. What is being advertised? A secure future with no financial worries. The picture implies that if you entrust your finances to them, you won’t have to worry about your future. The picture is telling you the WHY, not the WHAT. The WHY in this case is peace of mind, now and in the future.

Yet when it comes to marketing their products or services, I see so many …

Today you should take a moment to view your profile the way a stranger would.  With the announcement of Facebook’s new Graph Search, user privacy settings are getting renewed attention.  Any public information on your profile is now a possible introduction to your personal brand.

Thankfully, Facebook has given us an easy way to see which information that is.  Go to the privacy settings menu (shown), open “Who can see my stuff?” and select the box labeled “What do other people see on my timeline?” Hide or remove any likes, …

Last month ICANN, the organization that sets internet protocols and website naming conventions, announced that any “established public or private organization” can now register a top level domain (TLD).

Soon .ibm and .union may be join the ranks of .com, .org, and .net. The price tag to set up one of these vanity domains is $185,000, and ICANN is still working on the renewal fees.

TLDs have been introduced before to mixed results. Some TLD’s like .biz have taken a place as …

One of our clients recently approached us with an interesting problem. The email edition of their newsletter was too long. Readers who were interested in the side stories were giving up rather than reading or even scrolling past the lead story and subscribers who were interested in old articles would have to search issue by issue.

What the client needed was a website which would index and continue stories that began in their newsletter.

Enter WordPress.

WordPress.com is one of most popular blogging sites in the United States, and with some custom programming, it’s open source counterpart becomes …

What is CMS software in the first place?
CMS stands for Content Management System, and for the purposes of this article we will be discussing website content management systems. Web CMS software allows you to easily and efficiently manage a website and all of the associated text, images, and other files without having the technical knowledge of web programming. That being said, as a person who does possess the technical skills of a web developer, I wouldn’t even consider foregoing the great benefits of a CMS for the nostalgic joys of manually managing a website and its content. …